What do you do when you’re navigating a really difficult situation at work?
Where a team member is feeling very emotionally charged, a contractor has gone rogue, you’re bumping heads with your business partner, you’re feeling stretched and at capacity... whether something broke down in the business, there’s an operational fire, an unhappy client.
How do you handle it?
I want to share a practice I walk my clients through when they’re getting so caught up in the micro of the situation that they’re losing sight of what is the opportunity being presented to them.
Let’s say you’re working in a team and you have a colleague you’re not getting along with. You’re bumping heads, they’re being really difficult, and you cannot seem to see eye to eye. Plus, it’s somebody you can’t even fire... somebody who’s shoulder to shoulder with you, or even someone you’re working for.
It’s really easy to want to run away from the problem. If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s easy to think, “oh, I’ll just fire them and be done with it.”
But what happens if you choose to lean into the challenge?
What if the client who’s unhappy with your service is there to mirror back to you a part of you that you have not yet seen, acknowledged, or integrated? What if the team member you hired two years ago who is now being challenging is there to mirror back the ways you’ve shifted and shed old identities — and grown into a new version of yourself that is not compatible with the old ways of operating anymore? (I’ve seen what this reframe can do — When Your Worst Enemy Becomes Your Greatest Teacher is one of the most read pieces I’ve written on exactly this.
Because when we start to look at life as a benevolent force — when we really believe that we’re loved, we’re taken care of, that life, universe, God is looking out for us — it begins to shift how we relate and respond to the situation.
This is a thought exercise that one of my clients loves, to the point that she’s completely embodied it now: this person is just an avatar playing out something unresolved within you. Meaning: the difficult person in front of you is showing you something that lives inside you — a pattern, a wound, a place where you haven’t yet stepped up. That’s the invitation.
Let’s be real, people do shitty things. People act out of integrity. They break agreements.
But there’s a fine line between spiritual bypassing — it’s all my fault, it’s all happening inside of me, and therefore I should take accountability for all of it, including other people’s bad behavior — and the deeper inquiry of:
If I am creating my own reality, consciously or unconsciously, how is this experience playing out for my highest good?
Ask yourself that question.
What if life is presenting you with an invitation to see parts of you that were previously hidden? To see the places where you may be operating out of integrity, where you didn’t speak up for myself, where you overrode your intuition, where you didn’t have the courage to speak your truth?
How can you illuminate the places where you need to step up as a leader, as a partner, as a friend?
When you look at it from this perspective, it’s a win-win game.
Take an unhappy customer. On the surface it looks like a client problem to resolve. But zoom out, and it’s almost always pointing at something — a gap in how you set expectations, a place where you didn’t speak up when you should have, a standard you haven’t yet held for yourself. The situation didn’t create the gap. It revealed it.
And that’s just one example. Each difficult situation — the rogue contractor, the operational fire, the colleague you can’t get along with — has something specific it’s trying to show you. (And When Conflict Becomes Your Greatest Teacher goes deeper on the specific pattern underneath most of these moments.
These are all opportunities to learn more about yourself.
Because ultimately, the vision you’re bringing to life — your dream, what you’re here to create on a soul level — requires you to be showing up in a certain way, at a certain frequency.
In the audio, I walk through the specific questions I use with clients when they’re in the middle of a difficult situation — the ones that shift you from “how do I make this stop” to “what is this asking me to grow into.” I also talk about something I’ve observed spending time with happy, wealthy people — why the entrepreneur with ten franchises is less stressed than the contractor working twice as hard for a fraction of the revenue. It’s not talent. It’s not resilience. And understanding what it actually is changes how you relate to every hard thing that comes your way.
This transmission is for the leader who’s navigating something messy right now and is willing to ask: how do I get to grow into the person this situation is asking me to become?
TAKEAWAY: The challenges in your life aren't problems to manage — they're initiations. And you get to choose whether they forge you or just exhaust you.
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